Amazon Web Services insists on five principles: Security, Performance, Reliability, Cost Optimization, and Operational Excellence. Most are self explanatory; Security, ensure that your system cannot be hacked; Reliability, ensure that your system always works; Performance; ensure that your system responds quickly; Cost Optimization, ensure that your system does not break the bank. So what is Operational Excellence? To explain Operational Excellence, we need to understand how cloud environments provide value, and continue to provide value for their lifespan. Cloud environments help companies set up web applications, store data and distribute information.

To explain how to create Operationally Excellent cloud environments, we can look at a cloud environment like a manufactured product, as an assembled set of components. Each component is replaceable, manufactured in mass, and tested to ensure it meets a specific function. This component can be anything from door handles on cars, to springs in hinges. If a door handle breaks, another handle can be put in the door easily and effectively. If a spring is made, the manufacturer guarantees it will last a certain amount of time if used within its service capacity, (i.e. it is not over stretched or tampered with) Operational excellence is the practice of having storage, computation or other components easy to rebuild or fix.

Register for our upcoming live webinar.

This concept of assembling components into a large system is utilized in cloud computing as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). IaC has been used by Amazon, Google, Terraform and Microsoft to allow cloud environments to be written down as a configuration file with each component listed and detailed. The file is run against the cloud provider and the environment available for use. The IaC file example below is from Amazon’s IaC product called Cloud Formation. It creates an alarm that will send a notification if costs exceed a certain amount.

Although this file may look complicated, it lists many necessary attributes for the spending alarm, such as where notifications should go to under “AlarmActions”, and at what spending level the alarm should be triggered, under “Threshold”. Since this is IaC file acts as the alarm component for all cloud environments in a company, each attribute can be easily modified, and new alarms can be tested and deployed quickly, allowing for greater flexibility and control over cloud components. The IaC file has the added benefit of acting as documentation since engineers can simply look at the file if they want to understand how a cloud environment is built.

Keeping to the same standards for components in IaC files for logging or other components, such as authentication, storage or computation, in cloud environments is Operational Excellence. Everything is templatized and modular to allow new technologies to be built, tested, and deployed. New environments could be stood up quickly and effortlessly.

Although Operational Excellence provides a great deal of value, it begs the question, why is this not common practice. The answer is time. At Caserta, we often recommend creating IaC files for system components, however few companies see the value in taking apart their existing cloud environment and rebuilt it with IaC files as it does not provide immediate value to the end user. The payoff comes with time, as engineers are free to move quickly without having to worry about destroying the system. Systems are documented and all engineers can easily understand the inner workings of environments. This is as valuable as the time required for engineers to define system requirements or understand components, and thus we highly recommend considering Operational Excellence in your cloud environments.

Great time talking board level data and analytics strategy with my guy @Doug_Laney at @CasertaData at @InTouchNetworks. It was a real honor and pleasure to be up there with him. #datastrategy #analyticsstrategy #infonomics

Has your organization implemented #datademocratization as part of its #datastrategy? Register now for our next live webinar with @Alation to learn why #data democratization is critical to business success: https://t.co/rLArUhNS7i

It is great to have @Doug_Laney talking about #CDO advisory data management practices at #DAMA-NCR and the value of data in his great new book. Helping us all identify ways to generate direct and indirect economic benefits from your data

About Us

Caserta is a leading strategic technology consulting and implementation firm with a reputation for creating bold, state-of-the-art solutions. Our business is built around creative thinking and harmonious collaboration with our clients.

We use cookies to enable website functionality, understand the performance of our site, provide social media features, and serve more relevant content to you. We may also place cookies on our and our partners’ behalf to help us deliver more targeted ads and assess the performance of these campaigns.

Cookie and Privacy Settings

How we use cookies

We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.

Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.

Essential Website Cookies

These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.

Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, you cannot refuse them without impacting how our site functions. You can block or delete them by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website.

Google Analytics Cookies

These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience.

If you do not want that we track your visist to our site you can disable tracking in your browser here:

Click to enable/disable google analytics tracking.

Other external services

We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.

Google Webfont Settings:

Click to enable/disable google webfonts.

Google Map Settings:

Click to enable/disable google maps.

Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:

Click to enable/disable video embeds.

Privacy Policy

You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.